Another famous bronze of Nuremberg is the well-known “Goose Man” fountain, by Labenwolf.  Every traveller has seen the quaint half-foolish little man, as he stands there holding his two geese who politely turn away their heads in order to produce the streams of water!

With the best bronzes, and with steel used for decorative purposes, the original casting has frequently been only for general form, the whole of the surface finishing being done with a shaping tool, by hand, giving the appearance of a carving in bronze or steel.  In Japanese bronzes this is particularly felt.  The classical bronzes were evidently perfect mosaics of different colours, in metal.  Pliny tells of a bronze figure of a dying woman, who was represented as having changed colour at the extremities, the fusion of the different shades of bronze being disguised by anklets, bracelets, and a necklace!  A curious and very disagreeable work of art, we should say.  One sometimes sees in antique fragments ivory or silver eyeballs, and hair and eyelashes made separately in thin strips and coils of metal; while occasionally the depression of the edge of the lips is sufficient to give rise to the opinion that a thin veneer of copper was applied to give colour.

The bronze effigies of Henry III. and Eleanor, at Westminster, were the work of a goldsmith, Master William Torel, and are therefore finer in quality and are in some respects superior to the average casting in bronze.  Torel worked at the palace, and the statues were cast in “cire perdue” process, being executed in the churchyard itself.  They are considered among the finest bronzes of the period extant.  Gilding and enamel were often used in bronze effigies.

Splendid bronzes, cast each in a single flow, are the recumbent figures of two bishops at Amiens; they are of the thirteenth century.  Ruskin says:  “They are the only two bronze tombs of her men of the great ages left in France.”  An old document speaks of the “moulds and imagines” which were in use for casting effigy portraits, in 1394.

Another good English bronze is that of Richard Beauchamp at Warwick, the work of Thomas Stevens, which has been alluded to.  In Westminster Abbey, the effigy of Aymer de Valence, dating from 1296, is of copper, but it is not cast; it is of beaten metal, and is enamelled, probably at Limoges.

Bells and cannon are among the objects of actual utility which were cast in bronze.  Statues as a rule came later.  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, bronze was used to such an extent, that one authority suggested that it should be called the “Age of Bronze.”  Primitive bells were made of cast iron riveted together:  one of these is at the Cologne museum, and the Irish bells were largely of this description.  A great bell was presented to the Cathedral of Chartres in 1028, by a donor named Jean, which affords little clue to his personality.  This bell weighed over two tons.